Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
information-driven cultural systems, access/exclusion to information
and control and domination over information technologies, networks
and flows. The consequences are far reaching. The Information Age
is at the same time a disinformation age, in which information is out
of control through overloads, misinformation and disinformation. At
the same time, digitalised information has immediacy; its working,
effects and power are immediate and global, without any time for reflec-
tion. 13 Similar to Urry, Lash identifies the Information Age as one with
structural unintended consequences, leading to disorder but also to
new ordering principles and institutions, such as intellectual property
rights, branding, Google and weblogs. These new institutions reorder
the Information Age although along very different lines, institutions
and mechanism compared to the former industrial society.
This is all (fundamentally) different from the Information Society
literature and ideas, in which information and knowledge as such are
not questioned. Information and knowledge are seen as unproblem-
atic categories, still strongly in the Enlightenment tradition of eman-
cipation. If anything, it is the unequal access to and monopolistic
production/transmission of information that receives attention in the
Information Society literature, but not the fundamental uncertainties,
immediacies and disinformation that come along with global digital-
ized information flows. Structural uncertainties, the disenchantment
with science, the undermining of conventional institutions and the
constitution of new alternative decision-making practices and ordering
institutions are typical products of, and only emerge in, the Information
Age literature of the 1990s.
Governance
With globalisation and fundamental uncertainties of knowledge and
information, ideas of governance are also different. Although Castells
rooted the informational transformations and the rise of the network
society primarily in the economy (as most Information Society scholars
did), he also noted significant origins in and consequences for culture,
13
The central argument of Lash is that in the Information Age with its dominant
immediacy of information, (academic) reflection and critique becomes radically
different, if not impossible. Although interesting, this is beyond the scope of
argument of this topic and will not be explored further. See Sandywell ( 2003 )
for a further analysis and criticism of Lash's position on this.
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